Singing with a passion and fervor directly influenced by the classic soul heroes, JJ Grey has written and recorded five albums of original songs steeped in the rhythm & blues, rock and country soul of his native backwoods home outside Jacksonville, Florida. Grey comes from a long tradition of Southern storytellers and, in that spirit, he fills his songs with details that are at once vivid, personal and universal. After a decade of hard touring, he still spends eight months of the year on the road, bringing his music to a loyal, ever- growing, worldwide fanbase.
Florida swamp soul review in The New York Times , writer Nate Chinen praised JJ’s “balance of wildness and cool” describing his music as “Southern swamp rock with undercurrents of Memphis soul. His songs chronicle ambiguous truths and unambiguous urges,” delivered by Grey’s “winningly uncontrived vocals.” Likewise, Billboard has praised Grey’s “world-beating blend of Southern rock, blues and Florida swamp soul.” 2010 sees the Alligator Records release of Grey’s latest labor of love, Georgia Warhorse , named after the resilient Southern lubber grasshopper. “Yellow and black, and tough like an old-school Tonka toy,” says JJ. “They seem so at ease with the world. Nothing seems to rile them. They’re in no hurry, but they have a kind of resilience because they just keep coming back, and I’ve always felt there was a lesson in there for me to learn.” Grey could be described in such words; his own career has grown over the course of a decade of winning over fans night after night.
As with the previous releases, Grey meticulously demoed the entire Georgia Warhorse album himself, playing all the various instruments in his own home studio he calls the Egg Room. “It’s named after the old refrigerator room we used to keep eggs in when my grandparents were in the egg business,” says Grey. “Once I’m done with the demos, then I start thinking about hitting the real studio.” Armed with eleven new original songs, including one co-written with songwriting icons Chuck Prophet and Angelo Petraglia (Kings of Leon ), Grey and long-time friend and producer Dan Prothero hit the “real” studio, Jim Devito’s Retrophonics in St. Augustine, Florida, to begin tracking Georgia Warhorse. There, Grey would again track the majority of the instruments himself, playing guitars, keys, harmonica and delivering all the vocals in his gritty, straight-from-the-soul voice. Prothero’s approach as producer and Retrophonics’ unvarnished, natural sound mirror Grey’s vision of musical tones and his love of the rustic Florida backwoods, where his family has lived for generations.
